The Politic Worm:

Invertebrate life in the Early-Modern English Body

Ian MacInnes

"From whence came these insects in all these bodies?"

Daniel LeClerc, A Natural and Medical History of Worms

Almost everyone seems to know at least one thing about Hamlet’s Denmark: it is rotten.

This famous sentiment is rivaled only by “to be or not to be” as source of popular allusions and

parody. For the most part, this phrase and language like it in the play have been taken as purely

metaphorical. Powerful people have been behaving badly, and “rot” seems to reflect a suitably

disgusted attitude toward their malfeasance. Here, for example, is a conversation in which

Hamlet, feigning madness, traverses rapidly through a constellation of possibilities.

HAMLET: To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten

thousand.

POLONIUS: That's very true, my lord.

HAMLET: For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion -

Have you a daughter?

POLONIUS: I have, my lord.

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HAMLET: Let her not walk i'th'sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may

conceive-friend, look to't. 1

Hamlet is reading (or pretending to do so), and then commenting on his reading. The

zoological line about the sun’s breeding of maggots in the dog is purportedly one from his book. 2

He also frames his reading between two apparently unrelated comments, one social – the

dishonesty of men – and one sexual – the fertility of women. But as elsewhere in the play the non

sequiturs of Hamlet’s madness are not illogical. The maggots quite literally connect death and

conception; Hamlet is merely reading his zoology with an eye for metonymy. If this corruption

begins as a metaphor, however, it is one that returns so persistently in the play’s many registers

that it becomes an altogether different figure. In Hamlet’s vocabulary, the forces at work in

Denmark do not just resemble corruption; they share the same domain, a fact which makes

allusions to rot and to its products more metonymic than metaphorical. Critics have often seen

Hamlet’s attitude in this conversation as unique, even perverse. In his notes to the Arden edition

of the play, for example, Harold Jenkins calls it “a symptom of Hamlet's malaise that he thinks of

life's fertility in images of maggot-breeding carrion while the complementary growth of fragrant

flowers is ignored." But for most early modern natural philosophers, maggots, not flowers, most 3

powerfully represented life’s absolute fertility.

Corruption and its complement, generation, were the two basic organizing principles of

early modern zoology, and in invertebrate life forms – such as maggots – they coincided. These 4

lowly creatures embodied both corruption (being formed from putrefying matter) and generation

at its most basic (being created spontaneously by the action of natural heat). Harriet Ritvo has

said in her seminal work that animal discourse often serves as an “unacknowledged metonymy,

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offering participants a concealed forum for the expression of opinions and worries imported from

the human cultural arena.” This principle holds particularly true for invertebrates in the early 5

modern period. Resting peculiarly as they did at the threatening and ambiguous boundary of life

and death, generation and corruption, inward and outward, they served as powerful natural

examples of the same processes that were thought to result in economic and political dysfunction

in the human world, in the social body. Underlying the widespread cultural references to certain

humans as “worms,” “caterpillars,” and the like is the implication that the human and animal

arenas actually share a domain of usage and were thus metonymically related. The connections

between human and invertebrates that occur both in Hamlet and elsewhere in literary and social

texts are underpinned and partially determined by the force of metonymy.

“Nature’s Recreation”

The most important aspect of early modern invertebrate zoology is the nature of these

creatures’ generation. It is their mysterious fecundity that makes them appropriate vehicles for

articulating wider social ills. It is their ability to consume the very matter of which they are bred

that makes them appropriate vehicles for economic ills. And it is their ability to grow secretly

within an otherwise healthy body that makes them appropriate vehicles for political ills. The

term that links these various abilities is corruption, a concept that bridges a range of early

modern discourses and is inextribably linked with generation.

Invertebrates were above all thought to be creatures of corruption and morbidity. The

connection is not simply one of association, as it might be for a modern audience, but basic to the

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perceived nature of the creatures themselves. Although natural philosophy recognized sexual

reproduction in worms in certain circumstances, the Aristotelian tradition of spontaneous

generation still governed discussion of the nature of these creatures. The substances thought most

likely to breed worms were usually those perceived to be most corrupt. Aristotle lists dew, mud,

dung, timber, hair, flesh, and excrement as among the most likely suspects. 6

Renaissance accounts extended the connection between worms and putrefaction to

specific bodies. Even someone like Nicolas Andry de Bois-Regard, writing at the end of the

seventeenth century when spontaneous generation had been discredited, insists that worms bear a

close relationship to the substances in which they multiply. The humoral make-up of the worms’

immediate environment was crucial. As Bois-Regard notes, worms may be bred from eggs, but

the eggs will not hatch and grow unless the humors that surround them are amenable. In humans,

this principle means that people with a given humoral complexion will be susceptible to one kind

of worm and not another. Some people, with a particular humoral complexion, may be immune

to worms altogether. William Ramesey also lists the source of many of these creatures. Bees 7

come from calves, wasps come from horses, flies from muck and carrion. The earth itself breeds

dragons, serpents, toads, and spiders, among others, in caverns filled with "putredinous matters."

Even though he supposes worms to be bred through contagion or communication, corruption still

plays an important role:

vermicular or atome like corpuscles or ferments ... flow out of gross, corrupted bodies,

and fly through the Air, whereby they are communicated to bodies capable of, and fitted to

receive such impressions; and so by their evil and venemous ferment are inserted. 8

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In reading works like these, one quickly realizes that worms in humans, as in other

animals, are not pathological or even unusual but an expected occurrence. In his Natural and

Medicinal History of Worms, Daniel Le Clerc argues that man is the tapeworm’s natural

environment since it lives longer in a man than in anything else. Children are born with their

worms already in them, he says; the worms grow old along with them. Ramesey’s 9

Helminthologia goes even further on this subject. All bodies, he says, produce worms, the

reasons are "as ancient as the Creation itself." All bodies can putrefy; therefore all bodies can 10

produce worms. If every individual harbored worms uniquely suited to his complexion, nearly

all early moderns shared the dubious distinction of being “en-wormed.”

The very words used to describe such creatures in the early modern period are ambiguous

in ways that underline the importance of corruption and putrefaction as organizing principles in

this zoological discourse. The modern word “invertebrate,” for example, has no precise

corresponding early modern counterpart. The organizing concept for these creatures was not

structural but constitutional. Some philosophers used the term “insects” but with an

accompanying apology. For instance, Bacon notes that “The word insecta agreeth not with the

Matter,” observing that “we ever use it for Brevities sake, intending by it Creatures bred out of

Putrefaction.” As it turns out, Bacon intends by it, among other things, eels, snakes, and 11

earthworms. We might find it easy to see how terms like “caterpillar” and “worm” were entirely

interchangeable, but few semantic barriers seemed to exist across the whole spectrum of such

(creeping? squiggling?) creatures. For example, the “locusts” mentioned in some biblical

passages were sometimes rendered as “caterpillars” in the Geneva and King James edition

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(Jeremiah 51:14, 51:27; Joel 1:4). The linking concept, as Bacon suggests, is not the shape or 12

size of these creatures but their origin. As Ramesey puts it in Helminthologia, such creatures

arise “From putrid, vitious and gross viscid, corrupt matter of what nature soever.” The only

requirement is that such matter have “a vital principle in it selfe apt for generation.” Opinions 13

differed on which specific creatures arose from which substances, but all agreed that putrefaction

was essential and that the life emerging from putrefaction could be described by example but

never completely enumerated. The sheer variety of such creatures led Samuel Hartlib to call

them “Natures recreation, which she out of the fracid ferment of putrifying Bodies doth form, in

which … there is singular and rare variety.” 14

The other concept linking these creatures in early modern zoological texts is the quality

of the threat they offered to other life forms. Caterpillars and worms were described as a general

and widespread problem rather than a specific threat (unlike, say, a tiger). But Moffet also makes

it clear that these creatures were also perceived as threats not to the individual farmer but to an

entire agricultural region: “A Garden,” he says, “hardly and slenderly can suffice to feed one

Caterpiller.” This fear that caterpillars would escape the boundaries of individual fields and 15

gardens is due in part to their reputation for sheer gluttony, the inability to be satisfied.

Yet nobody attributed widespread destruction to a far-ranging single caterpillar or group

of caterpillars. If they moved across boundaries or permeated a region it was by virtue of their

ability to reproduce. Natural philosophers remained consistently astonished at the fertility of

invertebrates. They were, of course, recognized as one of the primary threats to agriculture, and

specific remedies for their presence abound, including bear grease, brimstone, ivory, goat’s

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hoofs, ox-dung, and so on. When the source of worms or caterpillars could be tied to particular

seeds, eggs, or objects such as nests, thorough destruction of the vermin would be essential.

Remedies such as sweeping out the nests of tent caterpillars caution against leaving the smallest

part remaining lest it quickly replace the rest. More often, however, the origin of these 16

creatures was mysterious, leading to conjectures that they could be produced by specific climatic

conditions and were therefore a regional rather than a local problem. The sheer number of

caterpillars that could appear in a relatively short time seemed to confirm this idea. It certainly

kept some natural philosophers from dismissing the classical theory that such creatures breed

from dew:

These that the Greeks call ipes, are made of dew or of a humour shut up in webs and

putrefying, especially when the wind is from the east, and the air warm, that hastneth

corruption. For then a mighty army of them breaks forth in our country, that we cannot truly say

or think so many could be bred any way but from corruption. 17

William Ramesey even argues that particular climates themselves breed these creatures. The 18

close relationship between invertebrates and climate is a widespread feature of zoological

thought in the period. In his encyclopedic work of natural philosophy, Albertus Magnus had

argued that the lowest members of the animal kingdom had a more material and earthbound

status and hence were most likely to be determined by environmental conditions. Such lowly 19

creatures, therefore, were frequently perceived as a regional rather than local pest and one arising

from widespread climatic conditions rather than specific acts of generation. Yet they could be

taken as evidence of corruption occurring at a national level as well.

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To some degree putrefaction operates as one of the principles of the created world. It is

not even something reserved for what we consider living or once living bodies, such as plants

and animals. Even stones could putrefy and breed worms, although in doing so they operate as

once-living beings: "for they have invisible and secret passages, nerves, veins, and turnings,

whereby they either draw to them strange moysture, strange seeds and different vapours, or else

receive them being brought thither." Virtually everything, it seems, has worms within it, or at 20

least the potential to develop worms. This is the point at which the discourse of zoology

intersects with the wider traditions surrounding the concepts of Vanitas and Memento Mori. As

Philippe Ariès and Michael Neill have recently reminded us, death is something always present

within life in the early modern period. Death is, as Ariès puts it, "[an eruption] out of the bodily

envelope of the rottenness within." In looking at Vesalian anatomy, Neill argues that "what it 21

uncovered at the very core of the human fabric was nothing other than the figure of Death

itself." 22

It is tempting, I think, to stop here. After all, a narrative of corruption and morbidity does

seem to underlie the metonymic deployment of caterpillars and worms. But there is something

odd about spontaneous generation as it was described, something that might alter a simple

assumption that such creatures were deemed purely pathological. Corruption, or putrefaction,

was in most accounts the very antithesis of life itself. The semantic opposite of generation was

corruption, and the latter was considered both evidence of morbidity (when occurring in a living

body) and a necessary sequel to death (when occurring in a dead body). As Francis Bacon puts it,

"corruption is a reciprocall to generation: and they two are as nature's two terms or boundaries;

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and the guides to life and death." It is paradoxical, then, that invertebrates were thought to 23

emerge from corruption. It is not simply a case of life arising from death, because worms were in

their very essence a part of the putrefaction process that engendered them. Rather, the paradox is

that such creatures were known for their amazing fecundity. Instead of being perceived as the

last generative sighs of dead or dying bodies, they are hailed as exemplars of generation itself.

The fact that they could appear spontaneously made them emblematic of creation in an

Aristotelian sense insofar as they were perceived to be created purely by the imposition of form

(usually from the sun) upon matter. For philosophers like Francis Bacon, the generative nature of

worms made them an ideal subject for scientific study:

As the Nature of Things, is commonly better perceiued, in Small, than in Great, and in

vnperfect, than in perfect, and in Parts, than in whole: So the Nature of Viuification is best

enquired in Creatures bred of Putrefaction. The Contemplation whereof hath many Excellent

Fruits. First, in Disclosing the Originall of Viuification. Secondly, in Disclosing the Originall of

Figuration. Thirdly, in Disclosing many Things in the Nature of Perfect Creatures, which in

them lye more hidden. 24

In more poetic terms, by these creatures “doth Phisis shew her Deitie.” Thus although 25

invertebrates operate as a kind of anti-life, deriving their sustenance from the death and decay,

they are also the most basic and most powerful expression of life. 26

Their ambiguous position at both the beginning and end of life also made invertebrates an

occasion for expressing uncertainty about the very concept of causality. If every creature and

plant carried within it from birth either the seeds of the invertebrates that would emerge from its

putrefaction or, in the case of intestinal parasites, the worm itself, then generation did not

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necessarily precede corruption. In one astonishing passage in the Natural and Medicinal History

of Worms, Daniel Le Clerc wonders about the tapeworm which he supposes must have existed in

Adam (since all humans are born with a worm inside them). The question for Le Clerc, as it

would have been for others, is whether Adam’s worm was inflicted on him as part of God’s curse

or whether it existed in his body previously and benignly and was simply turned bad as part of

the curse. On the one hand, the tapeworm, being a creature of corruption, should emblematize 27

the mortal taste of the fruit: Adam’s worm is Adam’s choice writ within. On the other hand, since

worms and other invertebrates are a natural part of the created world, they might, like the serpent

(which was often classed with invertebrates) be innocent victims of Adam’s choice. Both

possibilities share the expectation that worms are present in the created world from the start. Nor

are worms invariably pathological in the medical accounts. Sometimes worms could be evidence

of health; they could purge the body. "For there are collected in us some putrefied excremental

superfluous parts," Moffet reports, "which the more bountiful hand of Nature changeth into

worms, and so cleanseth our bodies." Sometimes, apparently, one might greet the sight of 28

worms in one's stool not with horror but with a cry of pleasure, a sign that excess production was

being met by appropriate consumption. In effect, worms and caterpillars occupied a unique

position on the boundaries of life and death, health and disease.

“Caterpillars of the Commonwealth”

The paradoxical notion that life arises from putrefaction characterized early modern

discourses of what constitutes economic, political and social well-being, with the effect that

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invertebrates became metonymic vehicles for expressing such debates. Members of this large

and indeterminate group of creatures were conscripted for a variety of purposes in the human

arena, in each case in ways that reflect their zoology. By far the most common use of

invertebrates in the early modern period, for example, is as names to describe those persons who

represented an economic threat to society. In England the phrase “caterpillar of the

commonwealth” became uniquely popular. It can at first seem like a bewildering variety of 29

people at whom such insults are directed. As Charles Hobday says, who qualified for the

comparison “depended upon the user's social standing and political viewpoint.” The insult was 30

never gratuitous, however, and there were at least two major groups against whom the term was

employed. The first was the poor. Alexander Gardyne, in his book of "characters" says of

beggars,

None are more noysome, than these swarming frogs.

For into everie hamlet, Towne, and Farme,

Lyke Caterpillars they doe flocke and swarme.

At Bed, at Board, from Home, and in the House,

Their fellow and Companion is a Lowse.

They are all, he says “wasters of the common-wealth.” Arthur Warren, in a slightly more 31

sympathetic tone, laments that most people consider "Poorelings but Caterpillers ... / And

Canker-wormes increasing Countries dearth." Given the frequent legislation against the poor in 32

the early modern period, it is hardly surprising to find them characterized as socially undesirable.

The term “caterpillar” or “worm” would seem to indicate that they were understood primarily as

unproductive, consuming without returning anything. Contemporary economic thought,

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however, lacked coherent theories about the relationship between production and consumption.

The concept of the “just price” merely insisted that the two be equally matched. As Gerard

Malynes puts it in Lex Mercatoria,

Everie man knoweth that in the buying and selling of commodities, there is an

estimation and price demanded and agreed vpon between both parties, according to a certaine

equalitie in the value of things, permuted by a true reason grounded vpon the commodious vse

of things. 33

In early mercantile thought, production tended to be the focus while demand and

consumption remained untheorized. This meant that any consumption was potentially

problematic if considered by itself. Yet consumption, particularly conspicuous consumption,

helped underpin the entire system of rank and degree. The difference between appropriate and

inappropriate consumption could be determined only by those in power. The notion that

luxuries, or indeed wealth itself, could be considered products was only beginning to form.

Invertebrates, which implied dearth but embodied plenty, shared a troubled epistemology with

economics. In addition, public assistance in the early seventeenth century was hardly generous

enough to turn the poor into a drain on the national economy. In fact, the image reflects much

more general worries about the relationship between wealth and poverty. Gardyne, for example,

uses the word "swarm" twice in one short passage. The problem with the poor, in his view, is

their ever-increasing number, a growth that makes them appear increasingly voracious. The

numbers of poor and displaced persons were indeed increasing throughout the end of the

previous century. Contemporary observers simply took them as a cause rather than a symptom 34

of the "countries dearth."

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At the same time divines like Hugh Latimer associated human caterpillars with

extortionists, usurers, and covetous people. Such people were not quite the same in the popular

imagination as ordinary criminals. Here canon law and the doctrine of the just price had more

force. Latimer sees such people as morally problematic because they consumed more than they

were allowed:

The upright good man hath his living through his labour and faythfull prayer, Beware

that you trust not in your labor, as though ye got your living by it: for as S. Paule sayth …

Neither he that planteth is ought, nor hee that watereth, but God that geveth the increase …

They that be the children of this world (as covetous persons, extorcioners, oppressours,

caterpillars, usurers) thynke you they come to Gods storehouse? No no, they do not, they have

not the understanding of it, they cannot tell what it meaneth, but rather they thinke to get it with

deceite and falsehoode, with oppressions, and wrong doynges. 35

As an explanation of crime, this passage seems overdone, but its excess reveals a

distinction between ordinary crime and the actions of these social parasites. A simple thief might

take property that didn't belong to him, but he presumably knew himself to be a criminal. The

usurer, extortionist, or caterpillar, on the other hand, seemed dangerously close to legitimizing

his excessive gain or profit, as though it were a perfectly normal business practice. To

contemporary conservatives like Latimer such people lacked understanding of God's storehouse

because they trusted in the fruits of their own labor. The very fact that such a question might

arise, however, particularly in a sermon, demonstrates that the status of profit or "increase"

wasn't unambiguous. In fact, the contemporary debates about usury and the legitimacy of

practices like insurance demonstrate how easily otherwise legitimate mercantile activity could

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fall into the same category as extortion. London’s nascent financial market attracted criticism of

precisely this sort from Edward Hake’s Newes out of Powles Churchyarde:

and oft (such is the trade)

That from the grand stock flowes so much

as petie stockes are made

And here the caterpillers haunt.

In Powles forsooth they use

To spend the day to make their mart

and hearken after newes.

Was ever seene such state confusde,

such monstrous kinde of men,

Such vomite, reffize, Dunghill drosse

what man can tell me when

such watch, such ward, such winking wiles

were ever put in ure

In time to fore, or such foule fraude

sir Nummus to procure. 36

In Hake’s view the human caterpillar is a wealthy man. He is also part of an entire

“dunghill” environment of putrefaction. Those who called others caterpillars or worms were thus

primarily demonstrating their uncertainties and anxieties not about the poor but about the

changing status of profit and consumption.

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These economic anxieties corresponded closely with the zoological status of invertebrate

life in general. Real worms and caterpillars frequently caused concern because of their excessive

appetite, a quality both paradoxical and proverbial. Moffet gives a whole list of proverbs to this

effect. "Who drinks the sea, and spews it up again," runs one such adage, “when compared with

worms, will be admir'd in vain.” They are all, Moffet says, “gluttonous devourers of trees and

herbs.” When he says a single caterpillar has too big an appetite to be satisfied with a whole

garden, he is reaching back to Martial. This obsession with invertebrate appetite is reflected in 37

the rudimentary taxonomy of the period. It organized worms and caterpillars according to their

diet, and as today it was widely recognized that specific caterpillars and worms often ate only

one kind of food. "Almost every herb," it was thought, "hath its particular caterpillar." Hence 38

we find references to species like the bramble caterpillar and the St. James wort caterpillar. This

close identification between the worm and its diet meant that ontologically speaking there was

very little difference between the consumer and consumed. If every herb had a caterpillar, then

presumably every caterpillar had an herb, suggesting that they were ontologically interconnected.

They form one of the many intricate series of organizing correspondences that Foucault describes

so poetically in The Order of Things. When worms or caterpillars appeared, either on plants or 39

in animal bodies, they weren't necessarily perceived as an external event or species but rather as

something latent within the very thing being consumed. If worms appeared in a human, for

example, they were idiosyncratic, not invasive. It wasn’t so much that humans, like herbs, had

their specific worms, but rather that human worms emerged naturally from within the human

body. They were, in a real sense, part of the individual. This zoological claim about the

relationship between the worm and its individual host made such creatures particularly good

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candidates for thinking about social ills because these were seen as endemic rather than external.

Warren’s “pooreling” caterpillars and Hake’s “caterpillar” financiers both consume the body of

the commonwealth from within.

If these lowly creatures’ appetites were used to designate a particular attitude toward

economics, they were equally useful to express ideas about the dangers of the political realm. For

the early moderns, the distinction between corruption and appropriate behavior in politics is as

hard to maintain as the difference between appropriate and inappropriate consumption in

economics. The political ideologies of the period encouraged the creation of royal favor and

royal favoritism, and most of the civil bureaucracy was run as a system of rewards and

patronage; modern notions of political corruption are difficult to apply. In this environment, the 40

difference between an ambitious governor and a corrupt caterpillar was uncertain. Fears about

secrecy offered another natural connection between invertebrates and the socio-political domain.

In the most common phrase, for example, conscience is called a worm because it acts within the

body, out of sight. Worms were also used to refer to a more destructive kind of secrecy, usually

through the image of the worm in the bud, as when Romeo’s father describes his son’s

unwillingness to explain himself in Romeo and Juliet:

But he, his own affections' counsellor,

Is to himself--I will not say how true--

But to himself so secret and so close,

So far from sounding and discovery,

As is the bud bit with an envious worm,

Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,

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Or dedicate his beauty to the sun. 41

As an emblem of inwardness, the worm's status is distinctly ambiguous. The "envious

worm" is an enemy of the natural development of the individual who might otherwise "spread

his sweet leaves to the air." But it is also a product of the individual, being what "he ... is to

himself." Worm images were employed with similar effect in a wider political and social sphere.

Shakespeare’s Henry VI, for example, draws on a long tradition when he calls civil dissension "a

viperous worm / That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth." Yet if secrecy in the political 42

arena was threatening, as it is in this passage, it also was (and still is) understood to be a natural

element of politics. 43

The idea that worms represented secrecy in a social environment has a counterpart in

Renaissance natural philosophy, which frequently attributed malicious secrecy to real worms.

These secretive worms were feared in part because of their ability to consume things from

within. Plant buds were often mentioned as the prey of hidden worms. The ability of worms to

destroy in secret was one reason their generative causes attracted so much attention. On the one

hand, certain worms and caterpillars were known to reproduce themselves, and their eggs had

been observed. On the other hand, there were many worms whose conception, since

unobservable, was thought to occur spontaneously within certain substances. The existence of

competing theories causes an encyclopedist like Moffet to taxonomize further: "to express both

kindes of Catterpillers," he says, "we shall divide them into those that are bred from other things;

and those that are bred from their own kind alone." It was the kind of caterpillar or worm "bred 44

from other things" that was particularly unsettling because no agent was required to get them

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inside the thing they were destroying. They could work their destruction from within while even

the closest external inspection would reveal little until the last moment: no telltale hole in the

apple, no slimy trail up the wheat stalk. This ability to destroy secretly made worms a perfect

vehicle for the fears of deception and duplicity that are so typical of early modern political

thought. These are the fears, after all, that dominate Hamlet’s Denmark.

The Rankness of Denmark

It is no surprise that the best-known literary text in which putrefaction plays a major role

is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, revolving as it does around the rottenness of the Danish state. And

indeed the play is full of references to invertebrate life. The zoological and the political find their

natural concurrence in Hamlet’s everyday language. What I suggest is that the metonymic

deployment of invertebrate life elsewhere in early modern England might cast new light on

passages traditionally understood mainly as metaphorical or merely symptomatic of Hamlet’s

psycho-social condition. These images suggest that Hamlet’s ambivalence is not unique but a

symptom of a larger cultural uncertainty about the relationship between health and disease, both

in the individual body and the body of the commonwealth.

From the beginning of the play, the situation in Denmark seems to suggest the very kind

of juxtaposition of life and death that is the main subject of early modern invertebrate zoology.

We are met with a marriage following closely on the heels of a funeral. As Claudius announces

in the first few lines of the play, his reign commences “with mirth in funeral and with dirge in

marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole” (1.2.12-13). Hamlet notices the same

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thing, but of course he has a more sardonic view: “The funeral bak’d meats / Did coldly furnish

forth the marriage tables” (1.2.180-1). Marriage is a perfectly acceptable opposite to death in the

period since one of its most widely acknowledged functions was the generation of children. This

notion is attested in texts ranging from the Homily on Matrimony, which declares that marriage is

intended “to bring foorth fruite, and to auoide Fornication,” to Shakespeare's own marriage

sonnets in which generation becomes an actual antidote to death, enabling the young man “to see

thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold” (Sonnet 2). Not to marry, in the words of the sonnets,

is “To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir” (Sonnet 6). We know, of course, that 45

the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude has political effects. In fact, Margreta De Grazia argues

that the riddles of Hamlet’s language primarily express “suppressed political discontent.” But to 46

interpret the physical implications of Hamlet’s language primarily as suppressed politics is to

risk missing the metonymic logic of invertebrate life that it expresses.

Because of the play’s turbulent mix of life and death, the vocabulary of corruption and

disease is pervasive. Sometimes the language is directed at politics, as in Horatio’s premonition

that the ghost “bodes some strange eruption to our state” (1.1.68). The word “eruption” here is

frequently glossed merely as something like “revolt,” or “disturbance,” but it is a word closely

connected with corruption and disease, whether real or metaphorical. In the words of one early 47

sermon, sin is

a disease both hereditary, as to the root of it, which together with our nature we receave

from our parents, and likewise contracted by our selves, upon our selves, in the dayly eruption

of this corruption, by thoughts, words and worke. 48

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An eruption is simply an outward manifestation of corruption, which as we have seen is

frequently conceived of as essentially inward condition. Elsewhere the language of hidden

corruption is more personal as when Laertes tells Ophelia about canker worms as a way of

heavy-handedly warning her off Hamlet:

The canker galls the infants of the spring

Too oft before their buttons be disclos'd

And in the morn and liquid dew of youth

Contagious blastments are most imminent. (1.3.39-42)

Hamlet’s own vocabulary is particularly rich in such images, but in his case they seem

appropriate to his political estrangement, not personally but philosophically apt. As de Grazia

puts it, “In life as well as death, the kinship between man and dust is in evidence.” 49

At the same time, Hamlet’s “kissing carrion” is hardly a serene acknowledgment of

generative power. The problem is that the quintessential act of generation, arising as it does from

corruption, carries with it the threat of overgrowth and excess. It should be no surprise that in a

play so consumed by putrefaction and corruption the topos of the ill-kept garden, the ultimate

ground for caterpillars and worms, is always in the background. Most early versions of the

garden topos are exclusively political, as in Richard II. For Hamlet, however, it becomes more 50

wide ranging:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't, ah fie, 'tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed: things rank and gross in nature

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Possess it merely. (1.2.133-137)

Hamlet's garden also stresses the economic tension between production and waste in the

garden. He sees the world as unproductive but also as full of excess. That which is "rank" or

"gross" is paradoxically unprofitable through overproduction. Rank growth is unrestrained. It

threatens to overcome order, degree, and distinction under a mass of undifferentiated growth.

The words "weary, stale, flat" imply a kind of barrenness that is ultimately contradicted by

rankness, which is elsewhere connected with unhealthy or excess fertility: Hamlet, for instance,

criticizes his mother for living "in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed / Stew'd in

corruption" (3.4.92-93). The “rankness” of her sweat is partly a matter of odor, but the

combination of heat and excrementality (both sweat and the substances enseaming the bed)

suggests that the “corruption” Hamlet is talking about is quite literal. Beds, like gardens, were

places uniquely suited to the mysterious energies of putrefaction, as at least one seventeenth-

century physician warns: “Beds suck in and receive all sorts of pernicious Excrements that are

breathed forth by the Sweating of various sorts of People.” The grave was also proverbially 51

referred to as a “bed of worms.” Of course Hamlet’s accusation is as much an acknowledgment 52

of the tenor of his world as it is specifically directed at his mother. His world itself is rank. Even

Claudius says that his own offense is “ranke” (3.3.36), and the poison that the players stage in

the murder of Gonzago is a “mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected” (3.2.251). 53

As the play progresses, Hamlet focuses more closely on the paradoxical juxtaposition of

life and death, and his zoological language becomes more overt. The death of Polonius, for

example, famously sends him into a highly allusive digression:

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KING CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

KING CLAUDIUS: At supper? where?

HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where a is eaten: a certain convocation of politic

worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat

us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service

—two dishes, but to one table. That's the end.

KING CLAUDIUS: Alas, alas.

HAMLET: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish

that hath fed of that worm.

KING CLAUDIUS: What dost thou mean by this?

HAMLET: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of

a beggar. (4.3.16-31)

As many have pointed out, there is certainly a reference to the Last Supper here, and in the play

on words an allusion to the Diet of Worms. Raymond Waddington argues that the passage is

intended to indicate Hamlet’s Lutheran sensibility, which he finds uniquely focused on the

corruption of the world. De Grazia allows the passage to be both a reference to mortality and a 54

gesture to larger historical topics like the Reformation. But the worm-parable is itself 55

compelling because it expresses a wider early modern truth about life. Just as in today’s

biological joke that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg, so the intimate relationship

between life and death embodied in maggots is capable of inversion. From this perspective

corruption is not an unfortunate telos of bodies but an embodiment of the basic principle of life

itself. In the face of this higher power, human social distinctions become meaningless. Hamlet

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appears to intend the image of the beggar digesting a king to be disquieting to Claudius, but its

force is neither merely punitive nor symptomatic of Hamlet’s increasingly disturbed condition.

Like the memento mori and vanitas mundi traditions that drive some of the final scenes, Hamlet’s

sentiments here are in part traditional. However, by insisting on the primacy of the worm, the

biological agent of corruption, he is twisting the tradition away from its Providential ends and

toward a crisis of conscience and political action. These are the ultimate consequences of

invertebrate metonymy in the play.

In early modern literary works, particularly Hamlet, corruption is often articulated in

terms that lead modern readers toward purely philosophical or spiritual interpretations. What

zoological and medical texts of the period suggest, however, is that corruption and its creatures

occupied a particularly contradictory position at the boundaries of life and death. Invertebrate

images tend to blur the lines between life and death as they do between the human, animal,

vegetable, and mineral worlds. They suggest that social forces are of a piece with the most basic

zoological categories of generation and corruption. Adam’s worm is not an external force but an

essential part of himself, and the human caterpillars of the early modern world, however

undesirable, are inextricably bound to the commonwealth.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 1

2.2.178-85. Future references are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically by act, scene,

and line number.

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Such claims about the relationship between natural heat and corruption are too 2

conventional to pin down. Perhaps Hamlet is even pretending to read from Aristotle. For a likely

section of the text he peruses, consider Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), 357-59.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, 466. A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy: lectures on Hamlet, 3

Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1905) has been perhaps the most influential

approach to the uniqueness of Hamlet’s morbidity.

Any effort to assign a single modern word to these creatures is problematic. In what 4

follows I will use invertebrates since it best represents for a modern sensibility the creatures

intended, although there were of course a few animals with backbones (like frogs and snakes)

that were sometimes characterized as creatures of putrefaction.

!24

Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate (New York: Penguin, 1990), 70. Ritvo writes of the 5

Victorians, but scholars of the early modern period have quickly followed the move from

symbolism and metaphor to metonymy. In 1983, for example Keith Thomas could claim that

“animals offered an almost inexhaustible fund of symbolic meaning”; see Man and the Natural

World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983),

40. Since then, a series of works have drawn increasingly nuanced connections between animal

and human arenas including Erica Fudge’s Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early

Modern English Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Bruce Boehrer,

Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England

(New York: Palgrave, 2002); Laurie Shannon, “The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the

Human,” PMLA 124 (2009): 472-479; and collections such as Karen Raber and Treva Tucker,

eds., The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Aristotle, History of Animals, trans. D. Arcy Wentworth Thompson (Cambridge: Internet 6

Classics Archive, 1996), http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.html. Book 5, part 19,

lines 16-20.

Nicolas Andry de Bois-Regard, De La Génération Des Vers Dans Le Corps De 7

L'homme, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1741), 12.

William Ramesey, Helminthologia, or, Some physical considerations of the matter, 8

origination, and several species of wormes (London, 1669), 9.

Daniel Le Clerc, A Natural and Medicinal History of Worms (London, 1721), 171-75.9

Ramesey, Helminthologia, 8.10

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Francis Bacon, Sylua Syluarum: Or a Natural History in Ten Centuries (London, 11

1627), 174.

In the 1599 Geneva Bible: “The Lord of hosts hath sworn by himself, saying, Surely I 12

will fill thee with men, as with caterpillars, and they shall cry and shout against thee” (Jeremiah

51:14); “Call up the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz against her: appoint the prince

against her: cause horses to come up as the rough caterpillars” (Jeremiah 51:27); “That which is

left of ye palmerworm, hath the grasshopper eaten, and the residue of ye grasshopper hath the

cankerworm eaten, and the residue of the cankerworm hath the caterpillar eaten.” (Joel 1:4)

Ramesey, Helminthologia, 6.13

Samuel Hartlib, The Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees (London, 1655), 23.14

Thomas Moffet. Theatre of Insects in Edward Topsell ed. The History of Four-Footed 15

Beasts, Serpents, and Insects, (London, 1658), 1040.

Ibid., 1041.16

Ibid., 1040.17

Ramesey, Helminthologia, 125-26.18

Albertus Magnus, De Animalibus Book 22-26: Man and the Beasts, trans. James 19

Scanlan (Binghampton NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987), 68.

Moffet, Theatre of Insects, 1082.20

Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 21

121.

Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy 22

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44.

Francis Bacon, History Naturall and Experimentall of Life and Death. Or, of the 23

Prolongation of Life (London, 1638), 73.

!26

Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 174.24

Nathaniel Baxter, Sir Philip Sydneys Ourania: Or Endimions Song and Tragedie, 25

Containing All Phylosophie (London, 1606), G4, line 1680.

Invertebrates retained a special position in zoological investigations of generation even 26

as notions of spontaneous generation were discounted. Jan Swammerdam, the first natural

philosopher to argue unequivocally against spontaneous generation (1682), says in the context of

caterpillars: “Nature performs the whole process of generation in these insects in so clear and

open a manner, that by the assistance thereof it should seem as if we could penetrate into the true

foundations (though hitherto buried in darkness) of the generation of other animals”; see his

Histoire Generale Des Insectes (Utrecht, 1682), 15.

Daniel Le Clerc, A Natural and Medicinal History of Worms (London, 1721), 350.27

Moffet, Theatre, 1111.28

The phrase itself was made famous in Act 2, scene 3 of Shakespeare's Richard II 29

(London: Methuen -Arden Shakespeare, 1969), but it occurs also in works such as Gosson’s

School of Abuse (London, 1579); Raphael Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles

comprising 1 The description and historie of England, 2 The description and historie of Ireland,

3 The description and historie of Scotland (London,1587); and Dekker’s Fortunatus (London,

1600), as well as in a number of minor works. Although some similar figurative uses of the word

occur in other European languages, they never rose to the prominence they achieved in England,

nor were they elsewhere focused so exclusively on social and political issues. The conceit is also

specific to the early modern period, emerging in the mid sixteenth century and vanishing almost

entirely within a hundred years (OED sb 2).

!27

Charles Hobday, "Clouted Shoon and Leather Aprons: Shakespeare and the Egalitarian 30

Tradition," Renaissance and Early Modern Studies 23 (1979): 69-70. Hobday finds the terms

applied to greedy gentleman, bishop's retinues, monopolists, lawyers, corrupt judges, and jailors.

On this topic, see Harry Berger’s forthcoming Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century

Dutch Still Life Painting (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2011).

Alexander Gardyne, Characters and Essays (Aberdeen, 1625), 42.31

Arthur Warren, The Poore Mans Passions. And Poverties Patience (London, 1605), ll. 32

109-14.

Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or The ancient law-merchant 33

(London, 1622), 91. For a recent discussion of just price, see Craig Muldrew, The economy of

obligation: the culture of credit and social relations in early modern England (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 43-44.

See, for example, A.L. Beir, Masterless Men (New York: Routledge, 1987) and Patricia 34

Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England

(Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006).

Hugh Latimer, Fruitfull Sermons Preached by the Right Reuerend Father, and Conftant 35

Martyr of Iesus Chrift, M. Hugh Latimer (London, 1584), 158-59.

Edward Hake, Newes out of Powles Churchyarde (London, 1579) 158-72.36

Moffet, Theatre of Insectes, 1039-1040.37

Ibid., 1039.38

Michel Foucault, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences (New 39

York: Vintage Books, 1973).

!28

Joel Hurstfield, Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England 40

(London: J. Cape, 1973).

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (London: Methuen - Arden Shakespeare; 2nd 41

series, 1980), 1.1.144-51.

William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1 (New York: Routledge - Arden Shakespeare; 3rd 42

edition, 2000), 3.1.72-73.

See, for example, Richard Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career (New York: Cambridge 43

University Press, 2007).

Moffet, Theatre of Insects, 1029.44

John Jewel, The second tome of homilies (London, 1623) 239. William Shakespeare, 45

The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed., John Kerrigan (New York: Penguin, 1986) 2.14, 6.14.

Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 46

2007), 90.

The latest Arden edition does allow that the word “could refer to a skin condition.” 47

William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Stamford, CT: Cengage - Arden Shakespeare; 3rd series, 2006),

155.

Nathaniel Hardy, The First General Epistle of St. John Unfolded (London, 1654), 200.48

De Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, 33. See also the discussion of the “soiled” nature of 49

human flesh which appears in Jean Feerick’s essay “Groveling with Earth in Kyd and

Shakespeare’s ‘Historical Tragedies,’” in this volume.

!29

William Shakespeare, Richard II (Arden Shakespeare; 3rd series, 2002), 3.4.40. For a 50

discussion of the garden topos, see Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern

English Gardens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Jennifer Munroe, Gender and the

Garden in Early Modern English Literature (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); and Amy Tigner,

“The Winter's Tale: Gardens and the Marvels of Transformation,” English Literary Renaissance

36.1 (2006): 114-34.

Thomas Tryon, The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness (London, 1683), 584. 51

These excrements. Tryon says, “lead to putrifaction and thence to all manner of vermin” (588).

In his Three heavenly treatises upon the eight[h] chapter to the Romances (London, 52

1609), for instance, William Cowper observes: “Let this comfort us against the present base and

contemptible state of our bodyes, now they are but filthy sinckes of corruption, and vessels so

full of uncleannesse, that the Lord hath appointed in the body five conduits to purge the naturall

filth thereof, and after this they are to be laid downe in the bed of corruption, the wormes spread

vnder them and aboue them (277).

“Rank,” could also refer to odor, of course (OED adj. 15a), but in the play this sense 53

never occurs without also including the sense of putrefaction (OED adj. 12).

Raymond B. Waddington, "Lutheran Hamlet," English Language Notes 27.2 (1989), 54

27-42, esp. 27.

De Grazia, 72.55

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